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UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIMENTS WITH MOBILE ROBOTS

R. Tanner, W. Mitchell, M.Z. Atashbar, and D.A. Miller

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008

This paper details an independent undergraduate research project centered around using a Rug Warrior ™ mobile robot for several types of experiments. The Rug Warrior™ is a mobile robot platform developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Joseph Jones, Anita Flynn, and Bruce Seiger and marketed by AK Peters Publishers. This paper includes a description of the robot, a discussion of programming techniques used for this robot, a description of a set of experiments conducted using the Rug Warrior ™, and the Rug Warrior ™’s advantages as a research tool.

The basis for the experiments is a series of “thought experiments” proposed in 1984 by Valentino Braitenberg. The experiments consisted of a few simple goals to establish basic operations such as movement, avoidance, and attraction. Later experiments consisted of various external stimuli such as light to judge responses to a given situation. This robot is a test bed for conceptual ideas that could then be scaled to other projects, including multiple cooperating robots.

Introduction The increased power of microcontrollers and microprocessors in the past twenty years has augmented the ability of robots to perform independent missions with little or no human intervention. Robots can now use microcontrollers that exceed the power of older IBM AT systems of the early eighties. Organizations such as NASA and the Department of Defense are becoming increasingly dependent on the use of such robots to accomplish missions that would prove too costly and dangerous otherwise. An example is the Sojourner robot on Mars. The microcontroller allowed the robot to perform mission tasks that required little human intervention. This paper will discuss the basic principles of how to implement behavior programming techniques on a relatively low cost robotic platform.

The principle of fusion behavior programming is a different approach from the traditional method of programming robots. The traditional system relies on having an accurate model of the world the robot will function in to perform its task well. Many different problems arise when applying this type of programming approach to complicated and ever changing problems in a non-controlled environment. Fusion behavior programming offers a different method of programming based on layers and priorities. The most basic functions have the lower layer and could include simple activities such as motion control. The higher functions might include object avoidance or investigation of objects with certain attributes. An example of behavior programming is as follows:

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright Ó 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Tanner, R. (2002, June), Undergraduate Experiments With Mobile Robots Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--11312